The Scholar

by Dervla McTiernan

  Carrie opened the door and let Paul out, then turned back to Mulcair and spoke urgently. ‘Bring him home to his mother. Make sure he gets inside the door, and that there is a responsible adult to supervise him before you leave. Make sure you get the transcript of the interview and the address of the apartment to DS Reilly as soon as possible.’

  Mulcair nodded in a determined-to-do-well manner that made her feel older than her thirty-five years. She left him to it, feeling that she had done what she could. She returned to her desk and descended again into her paperwork.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Carline had slept late on Saturday morning, and again on Sunday. Sleep seemed to be her body’s way of dealing with the situation. Instead of lying awake all night, her mind run ragged with anxiety, she fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, woke late and went through the days in a kind of stupor. She had an exam on Monday morning, should have been awake and frantically revising from the early hours. Instead she slept through her alarm and woke to the ringing of her phone just after 9 a.m.

  It was her grandfather. Carline sat up in bed and stared at the phone for a long moment before answering. It was three days since he’d received a phone call telling him that she was dead, and only now was he calling her. That really told Carline all she needed to know about where she stood in John Darcy’s affections, not that she’d needed the reminder. John had waited three days, but the company publicist, Anna Sheldon, had called her at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning, anxious to get ahead of the story. It was all so very predictable. If John thought of her at all it was as a source of embarrassment. Unfortunately, Anna’s efforts had come too late. By Saturday afternoon she’d emailed Carline to tell her that at least one article would appear, and an hour later Anna sent the link to Carline’s inbox.

  The article was mean-minded and snarky. She’d expected something small in one of the local papers, but it was a lengthy piece that took up half a page of one of the tabloids, in between an ad for botox and an article about Kate Middleton looking tired. Poor little rich girl Carline Darcy caught up in college death. The article was largely a copy and paste job. The hack who had written it had had plenty of material to work with.

  The piece dealt briefly and brutally with Carline’s early life – Carline was the product of a one-night stand between her late father, Eoghan Darcy, going through some sort of playboy rebellious stage, and Evangeline Grace, a part-time model, part-time escort, who had slept her way around the kind of European cities that attracted Russian oligarchs and British drug dealers. As an infant, Carline had been the subject of a hard-fought custody battle, which had played itself out in the newspapers, despite the fact that family law matters were supposed to remain confidential. (Carline was fairly sure that Evangeline had fed details to the tabloids in exchange for payment.) And then years later she’d been the subject of another flurry of negative publicity, when an in-depth exposé on some of John Darcy’s more aggressive business dealings also mentioned that his granddaughter Carline had been permitted to live with Evangeline after the death of her father. By then Evangeline had a sort of Z-list profile as an aging party girl. She was regularly photographed staggering out of some club or other. Given that and the character assassination the Darcy publicity machine had very effectively carried out during the original custody battle, she was widely understood to be an unsuitable parent. The journalists had come late to the story. Carline had only lived with her mother for three years. By the time she was fifteen Evangeline had grown bored with the arrangement, realised that she’d extracted as much money as she was ever going to get from the Darcys, and shipped Carline off to boarding school.

  All this old ground was rehashed in the latest piece. The only new material was a final paragraph explaining that Carline’s ID had been found on the body of a young woman, killed in a hit-and-run. To date gardaí have not been able to confirm Ms Darcy’s presence at the scene. The piece ended with a snide comment about how Carline’s version of student digs was a penthouse apartment overlooking the docks.

  Carline had deleted the article, the link and the email, then put her phone into her drawer and closed it. She went to the shower and spent a long, long time under the hot water. All of that was supposed to be in her past. Her mother, all that mess. That wasn’t who she was. She was the girl who worked hard. She was a Darcy, not her mother’s daughter, and she was earning a place in the Darcy world. She was so close, so very close, if she could only manage to hold on to what she’d already won, if she could cobble together a new pattern from the remnants of her perfectly woven plan. She’d tested the ground with Anna Sheldon, mooted the idea of joining the company early, and hadn’t been shot down. There was hope.

  Her phone kept ringing. She toyed with the idea of letting it go to voicemail, then forced herself to answer.

  ‘John,’ she said. ‘How are you?’ She’d never called him grandfather.

  ‘Carline, I’ve been meaning to call you. I hear there’s been some … difficulty on campus.’ His tone was relaxed. Carline drew her knees to her chest, pulled her duvet to her body. She was home, she was safe. Why did she feel afraid? She worked hard at keeping her tone light, amused.

  ‘I’m so sorry you were bothered with it. What a mess. I still can’t quite believe that they started making phone calls before they even identified the girl.’ She paused long enough to be sure he didn’t want to respond, then rushed on. ‘I wish you could have seen the guard’s face when Valentina introduced me. Honestly. It almost made the whole thing worthwhile.’ Her voice sounded tinkly, vapid. Unlike herself. A wave of heat swept over her.

  ‘You didn’t know the girl?’

  ‘As far as I know she hasn’t been identified yet, so I can’t be sure, but I don’t believe so. None of my friends are missing.’ Her first lie.

  ‘I’m told she had your ID.’

  Carline closed her eyes, clenched her right fist around her duvet. How much did he know?

  ‘I lost one, or had it stolen. At the beginning of the year.’ Her second lie.

  ‘College ID? Or a lab swipe card?’ He still sounded relaxed, but she doubted very much that he was.

  ‘College ID. If I’d lost a swipe I would have let security know.’ A third lie, and this one was stupid, so easily disproved. For a moment she hated him. Hated the way he made her feel, hated the way she answered him, as if she were a little girl, scared and guilty.

  ‘Of course you would.’ He was silent for a moment, or perhaps he had just held the phone away from his mouth. She could hear voices speaking in the background, then he returned to the call. ‘Carline, I have to go, but Anna mentioned you had asked about joining the company after your summer exams. That’s not a good idea. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that pharma is not Silicon Valley. You need your doctorate if you ever expect to be taken seriously.’

  ‘Of course, I never meant …’

  He cut her off. ‘I’m sure you didn’t.’ His tone was dry. ‘Why don’t you just concentrate on your thesis? If you finish early, perhaps we can look at it again.’ Message delivered, he ended the call. Carline lay in bed and nausea pooled and curled in her stomach. What the hell was she going to do now?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Cormac returned to the case room after the Henderson interview at 10 a.m to get an update from the team. There’d been nothing yet from the coroner. Fisher had called the morgue and had been told that Dr Connolly was just starting the autopsy. Dave McCarthy had organised a shortlist of possible matches from the missing persons list. None of them seemed likely candidates but until the autopsy was complete they couldn’t rule any of them out.

  Cormac sat in silence for a moment, considering his directionless team. They were doing good work with what they had, which wasn’t much.

  ‘Moira, I want you to start the door to door again. You might get people we missed on the last go around.’ Moira Hanley barely looked up from her work. ‘Dave, I want you here keeping an eye on things. Keep track of comms, and
let me know when Dr Connolly finally calls in.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ said Dave. His eyes went to Moira. Dave could be relied on to get her moving.

  ‘Fisher, you’re with me,’ Cormac said. Peter didn’t need to be asked twice. They were out of the door moments later. ‘I want to walk the scene,’ Cormac said. ‘And I want to check out those labs.’

  Fisher nodded. ‘That ID in her pocket. She had it for a reason, didn’t she? Any chance of grabbing some food on the way? I’m bloody starving.’

  They picked up a couple of sausage rolls at the Centra store opposite the campus, washed them down with coffee.

  ‘I’ve been reading about Carline Darcy,’ Fisher said. He looked out of the window as he spoke, had a sip of coffee.

  ‘Yes?’ Cormac said.

  ‘That ID. It’s hard to believe the girl just picked it up. And I don’t think Emma was wrong about that cardigan. I think Carline Darcy knows who our victim is.’ There was tension in Fisher’s voice, as if he wasn’t sure how Cormac would react to the idea.

  Cormac nodded. ‘Let’s not broadcast that too early, all right, Fisher? Someone like Darcy, there’s political pressure to stay away from her. We’re going to need a lot more before we take her on directly.’

  ‘Right. Okay.’

  ‘What did you learn from your research?’ Cormac asked.

  Fisher shook his head. ‘Well, if she was involved in the murder, she wasn’t motivated by money. If the articles I read were accurate, her father left her somewhere north of forty million when he died, and she came into that money the day she turned eighteen.’

  ‘That’s a lot of money for an eighteen-year-old. I wonder how the rest of the family felt about the inheritance.’

  Fisher gave him a look. ‘According to the articles Darcy Therapeutics is worth somewhere in the region of eight billion euros, and John Darcy owns fifty-one per cent of that company. In comparison to that sort of money, it’s a drop in the ocean.’

  ‘Presumably she’ll come into some of that too, in due course,’ Cormac said.

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ Fisher said. ‘It seems like she’s the black sheep of the family. Her mother is a good-time girl her father picked up for a one-nighter. If you believe the tabloids she was a model who was available for a lot more than modelling for the right man at the right price. Carline’s father sued for sole custody and won, but when he died the family didn’t seem to have much of a problem letting her go back to her mother. John Darcy had two children. His son, Eoghan, Carline’s father, and a daughter, Melanie. Melanie’s married with two kids.’ Fisher took a last sip from his coffee, waved his right hand in the air. ‘The family owns this huge luxury ski chalet in Switzerland and the entire Darcy clan spend Christmas there every year, including Melanie and her two daughters. There are loads of photos online – Hello! magazine seems to do an article every year. Carline Darcy has never been part of it.’

  Cormac nodded slowly, thinking it through. ‘And yet she’s here, in Galway, working out of a Darcy laboratory. And the story going around is that she’s something special. That maybe she’s the one who inherited her grandfather’s brilliance, if not his money.’

  Fisher shrugged.

  ‘I’d imagine that might be galling for John Darcy. If he all but froze her out, only to find that she has that sort of talent.’

  Fisher was silent for a moment. ‘So this guy, Darcy. He started out here? As a student?’

  ‘So I’m told,’ Cormac said.

  ‘D’you think that’s why he came back? Set up the labs here I mean, rather than somewhere a bit, you know, sexier?’

  ‘Somewhere warmer than the rainy west, you mean? My guess is that setting up here had more to do with government grants and tax incentives than loyalty to his alma mater. I don’t think Darcy spends much time here.’

  Cormac got out of the car long enough to bin the remains of their meal, then pulled out of the car park back into traffic, and took the turn down Distillery Road.

  His first visit to the Darcy lab had been with Emma. On their first weekend in Galway, she’d wanted to check out the place where she would be spending most of her time for the next five years. It had been a grey February day, rain spitting down intermittently and the temperature never quite making it over five degrees. The sort of day, in other words, that might have sent them running for Dublin. The labs looked like nothing much – a low concrete building with white plaster, and few windows. Emma told him later that the lab offices, on the other side of the building, had windows that overlooked the river, but he hadn’t known that at the time and if he had he wouldn’t have been particularly impressed. The water that day had been grey and hostile, uninviting and uninspiring. He’d half-expected Emma to change her mind about the whole move. But she’d turned to him with shining eyes and professed that this was the place where she could do her best work.

  ‘The labs are at the back of the concourse,’ Cormac said to Fisher. ‘There’s no parking back there so we’ll have to find a place here and walk over.’

  The scene was very much as they had left it on Friday night, except that now the sun was shining. Crime scene tape was up, the scene guarded by a single garda, who brightened up when she saw them, and resumed her slumped stance when Cormac gave her a nod but didn’t stop to chat. A few students walked the path towards the library, slowing, but not stopping, as they passed.

  Cormac could see the girl in his mind’s eye. A dark night, the car barrelling towards her. How afraid she must have been. Had she tried to run? He didn’t think so, not given her position on the road. If she had run, if fear hadn’t frozen her in place, she might have had a small chance. The footpath was the only barrier between the road and the car park. It wouldn’t have stopped a determined driver, but it might have slowed him down a little. She might have made it behind one of the parked cars, made a well-timed dash to the other side of the car park, over the low wall of the chapel and out and down the lane to the busy road beyond. But no. She had turned at the sound of the car engine, she had seen death in the approaching headlights, and fear had frozen her in place.

  It took only a few minutes to make their way down towards the river. Today, the lab looked less bunker-like. The sun had broken through and was reflecting off the bright, white plaster. The river beyond was blue and deceptively inviting. The water would be bloody cold, if you were stupid enough to take a dip. Many had, and quite a few hadn’t survived to tell the tale. On a calm day the Corrib looked meek and unthreatening, but lethal currents lurked under the surface.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ Fisher asked.

  ‘I want to talk to James Murtagh. He’s been the lead for this place for years. Carline Darcy works for him. If the girl spent time at the lab Murtagh should know about it.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  There were no windows at the front of the lab building, just an entrance with a narrow porch to offer shelter from the weather. The building had no signage of any kind, and the entrance door was dark, opaque glass. There was no doorbell either, just a sensor for security swipes fixed to the wall. Fisher tried the door but it was locked. Cormac nodded to the camera fixed to the wall above their heads.

  ‘The security guard will have seen us,’ he said. ‘If we wait I presume he or she will come to the door eventually.’ He leaned forward and rapped on the door with his knuckles, just in case. The sound was dull rather than sharp, as if the noise had been sucked into the building and absorbed by it.

  ‘Emma works here?’ Fisher asked. The expression on his face said that he didn’t see the appeal.

  ‘She says it’s better inside,’ Cormac said.

  Eventually the door was opened by a sandy-haired man in a security guard uniform. ‘Can I help?’ he asked. He spoke with an accent, had those high, Eastern European cheekbones. Polish probably.

  Cormac showed him his ID. ‘We’d like to speak with James Murtagh,’ he said.

  The security guard stepped back and held the door for them. The e
ntrance foyer was more welcoming than the outside of the building, but it was still very functional. The floor was polished concrete. There was a single desk and chair – for the security guard presumably. The desk held a monitor, a phone and a paperback copy of Adrian McKinty’s The Cold Cold Ground, the same book that sat on Cormac’s bedside table. The walls of the foyer were largely taken up with lockers.

  Cormac offered his hand for a shake. ‘Cormac Reilly,’ he said.

  ‘Josep Zabielski.’ The security guard shook with a cautious smile. ‘Everyone calls me Joe.’

  ‘You’re from Poland, Joe?’ Cormac asked.

  The security guard nodded. ‘From Zamość’ He looked from Cormac to Fisher, as if hoping for a nod of recognition. ‘It’s a small city, very beautiful, little bit smaller than Galway. It’s south of Lublin.’

  ‘Lublin,’ Fisher repeated, nodding.

  ‘You know Lublin?’ Joe asked, brightening.

  Fisher shook his head.

  ‘Joe,’ Cormac said. ‘Talk to me about your security cameras. What can you see?’ He gestured towards the monitor.

  Joe hesitated, glanced towards the door that led into the lab, as if he expected someone to come out. He turned the monitor a little way towards them, so they could see the screen. ‘I just see the entrance, that’s it. No other cameras.’

  ‘No cameras inside the facility? Nothing around back?’

  ‘Nothing inside. That would be a security risk. The feed could be hacked and a competitor might see the very private work. That is a very real risk, you know. The work here, it is worth many millions. And at the other side of the building there is only the river. No door leading inside.’ His accent was strong but his English was excellent.

  ‘Okay,’ Cormac said. ‘What about video?’

  Joe furrowed his brow. ‘Video?’

  ‘Recordings, taken from your camera at the front. How long do you keep them for?’